The Looking Glass War (9 page)

‘Very well, events then: if he swam the river, how did he preserve the film? How did he
really
take the pictures? Why isn’t there any trace of camera shake? He’d been drinking, he was balancing on tiptoe; they’re long enough exposures, you know, time exposures, he said.’ Haldane seemed afraid, not of Leclerc, not of the operation, but of himself. ‘Why did he give Gorton for nothing what he’d offered elsewhere for money? Why did he risk his life at all, taking those photographs? I sent Gorton a list of supplementaries. He’s still trying to find the man, he says.’

His eyes drifted to the model aeroplane and the files on Leclerc’s desk. ‘You’re thinking of Peenemünde, aren’t you?’ he continued. ‘You want it to be like Peenemünde.’

‘You haven’t told me what you’ll do if I get those instructions.’

‘You never will. You never, never will.’ He spoke with great finality, almost triumph. ‘We’re dead, don’t you see? You said it yourself. They want us to go to sleep, not go to war.’ He stood up. ‘So it doesn’t matter. It’s all academic, after all. Can you
really
imagine Control would help us?’

‘They’ve agreed to help us with a courier.’

‘Yes. I find that most odd.’

Haldane stopped before a photograph by the door. ‘That’s Malherbe, isn’t it? The boy who died. Why did you choose that name?’

‘I don’t know. It just came into my head. One’s memory plays odd tricks.’

‘You shouldn’t have sent Avery. We’ve no business to use him for a job like that.’

‘I went through the cards last night. We’ve got a man who’d do. A man we could send, I mean.’ Daring, he added, ‘An agent. Trained wireless operator, German speaker, unmarried.’ Haldane stood quite still.

‘Age?’ he asked at last.

‘Forty. A bit over.’

‘He must have been very young.’

‘He put up a good show. They caught him in Holland and he got away.’

‘How did he get caught?’

The slightest pause. ‘It isn’t recorded.’

‘Intelligent?’

‘He seems quite well qualified.’

The same long silence.

‘So am I. Let’s see what Avery brings back.’

‘Let’s see what the Ministry says.’

Leclerc waited till the sound of coughing had faded down the corridor before he put on his coat. He would go for a walk, take some fresh air and have lunch at his club; the best they had. He wondered what it would be; the place had gone off badly in the last few years. After lunch he would go round to Taylor’s widow. Then to the Ministry.

Woodford, lunching with his wife at Gorringe’s, said, ‘Young Avery’s on his first run. Clarkie sent him. He should make a good job of it.’

‘Perhaps he’ll get himself killed, too,’ she said nastily. She was off the drink, doctor’s orders. ‘Then you can have a real ball. Christ, that would be a party and a half! Come to the Black Friars’ Ball!’ Her lower lip was quivering. ‘Why are the young ones always so bloody marvellous? We were young, weren’t we? … Christ, we still are! What’s wrong with us? We can’t wait to grow old, can we? We can’t—’

‘All right, Babs,’ he said. He was afraid she might cry.

Avery sat in the aeroplane remembering the day when Haldane failed to appear. It was, by coincidence, the first of the month, July it must have been, and Haldane did not come to the office. Avery knew nothing of it until Woodford rang him on the internal telephone to tell him. Haldane was probably ill, Avery had said; some personal matter had cropped up. But Woodford was adamant. He had been to Leclerc’s room, he said, and had looked at the leave roster: Haldane was not due for leave till August.

‘Telephone his flat, John, telephone his flat,’ he had urged. ‘Speak to his wife. Find out what’s become of him.’ Avery was so astonished that he did not know what to say: those two had worked together for twenty years, and even he knew Haldane was a bachelor.

‘Find out where he is,’ Woodford had persisted. ‘Go on, I order you: ring his flat.’

So he did. He might have told Woodford to do it himself, but he hadn’t the heart. Haldane’s sister answered. Haldane was in bed, his chest was playing him up; he had refused to tell her the Department’s telephone number. As Avery’s eye caught the calendar, he realized why Woodford had been so agitated: it was the beginning of a quarter. Haldane might have got a new job and left the Department without telling Woodford. A day or two later, when Haldane returned, Woodford was uncommonly warm towards him, bravely ignoring his sarcasm; he was grateful to him for coming back. For some time after that, Avery had been frightened. His faith shaken, he examined more closely its object.

He noticed that they ascribed – it was a plot in which all but Haldane compounded – legendary qualities to one another. Leclerc, for instance, would seldom introduce Avery to a member of his parent Ministry without some catchword. ‘Avery is the brightest of our new stars’ – or, to more senior men, ‘John is my memory. You must ask John.’ For the same reason they lightly forgave one another their trespasses, because they dared not think, for their own sakes, that the Department had room for fools. He recognised that it provided shelter from the complexities of modern life, a place where frontiers still existed. For its servants, the Department had a religious quality. Like monks, they endowed it with a mystical identity far away from the hesitant, sinful band which made up its ranks. While they might be cynical of the qualities of one another, contemptuous of their own hierarchical preoccupations, their faith in the Department burnt in some separate chapel and they called it patriotism.

For all that, as he glanced at the darkening sea beneath him, at the cold sunlight slanting on the waves, he felt his heart thrilling with love. Woodford with his pipe and his plain way became part of that secret élite to which Avery now belonged; Haldane, Haldane above all, with his crosswords and his eccentricities, fitted into place as the uncompromising intellectual, irritable and aloof. He was sorry he had been rude to Haldane. He saw Dennison and McCulloch as the matchless technicians, quiet men, not articulate at meetings, but tireless and, in the end, right. He thanked Leclerc, thanked him warmly, for the privilege of knowing these men, for the excitement of this mission; for the opportunity to advance from the uncertainty of the past towards experience and maturity, to become a man, shoulder to shoulder with the others, tempered in the fire of war; he thanked him for the precision of command, which made order out of the anarchy of his heart. He imagined that when Anthony grew up, he too might be led into those dowdy corridors, and be presented to old Pine, who with tears in his eyes would stand up in his box and warmly grasp the child’s tender hand.

It was a scene in which Sarah played no part.

Avery lightly touched a corner of the long envelope in his inside pocket. It contained his money: two hundred pounds in a blue envelope with the Government crest. He had heard of people in the war sewing such things into the lining of their clothes, and he rather wished they had done that for him. It was a childish conceit, he knew; he even smiled to discover himself given to such fancies.

He remembered Smiley that morning; in retrospect he was just a little frightened of Smiley. And he remembered the child at the door. A man must steel himself against sentiment.

‘Your husband did a very good job,’ Leclerc was saying, ‘I cannot tell you the details. I am sure that he died very gallantly.’

Her mouth was stained and ugly. Leclerc had never seen anyone cry so much; it was like a wound that would not close.

‘What do you mean, gallantly?’ She blinked. ‘We’re not fighting a war. That’s finished, all that fancy talk. He’s dead,’ she said stupidly, and buried her face in her crooked arm, slouching across the dining-room table like a puppet abandoned. The child was staring from a corner.

‘I trust,’ Leclerc said, ‘that I have your permission to apply for a pension? You must leave all that to us. The sooner we take care of it the better. A pension,’ he declared, as if it were the maxim of his house, ‘can make a lot of difference.’

The Consul was waiting beside the Immigration Officer; he came forward without a smile, doing his duty. ‘Are you Avery?’ he asked. Avery had the impression of a tall man in a trilby and a dark overcoat; red-faced and severe. They shook hands.

‘You’re the British Consul, Mr Sutherland.’

‘H. M. Consul, actually,’ he replied, a little tartly. ‘There’s a difference, you know.’ He spoke with a Scottish accent. ‘How did you know my name?’

They walked together towards the main entrance. It was all very simple. Avery noticed the girl at the desk; fair and rather pretty.

‘It’s kind of you to come all this way,’ Avery said.

‘It’s only three miles from the town.’ They got into the car.

‘He was killed just up the road,’ said Sutherland. ‘Do you want to see the spot?’

‘I might as well. To tell my mother.’ He was wearing a black tie.

‘Your name
is
Avery, isn’t it?’

‘Of course it is; you saw my passport at the desk.’ Sutherland didn’t like that, and Avery rather wished he hadn’t said it. He started the engine. They were about to pull into the centre of the road when a Citroën swung out and overtook them.

‘Damn fool,’ Sutherland snapped. ‘Roads are like ice. One of these pilots, I suppose. No idea of speed.’ They could see a peaked cap silhouetted against the windscreen as the car hurried down the long road across the dunes, throwing up a small cloud of snow behind it.

‘Where do you come from?’ he asked.

‘London.’

Sutherland pointed straight ahead: ‘That’s where your brother died. Up there on the brow. The police reckon the driver must have been tight. They’re very hot on drunken driving here, you know.’ It sounded like a warning. Avery stared at the flat reaches of snowbound country on either side and thought of lonely, English Taylor struggling along the road, his weak eyes streaming from the cold.

‘We’ll go to the police afterwards,’ said Sutherland. ‘They’re expecting us. They’ll tell you all the details. Have you booked yourself a room here?’

‘No.’

As they reached the top of the rise Sutherland said with grudging deference, ‘It was just here, if you want to get out.’

‘It’s all right.’

Sutherland accelerated a little as if he wanted to get away from the place.

‘Your brother was walking to the hotel. The Regina, just here. There was no taxi.’ They descended the slope on the other side; Avery caught sight of the long lights of a hotel across the valley.

‘No distance at all, really,’ Sutherland commented. ‘He’d have done it in fifteen minutes. Less. Where does your mother live?’

The question took Avery by surprise.

‘Woodbridge, in Suffolk.’ There was a by-election going on there; it was the first town that came into his head, though he had no interest in politics.

‘Why didn’t he put her down?’

‘I’m sorry, I don’t understand.’

‘As next of kin. Why didn’t Malherbe put his mother down instead of you?’

Perhaps it was not meant as a serious question; perhaps he just wanted to keep Avery talking because he was upset; nevertheless, it was unnerving. He was still strung up from the journey, he wanted to be taken for granted, not subjected to this interrogation. He realised, too, that he had not sufficiently worked out the supposed relationship between Taylor and himself. What had Leclerc written in the teleprint; half-brother or step-brother? Hastily he tried to visualise a train of family events, death, remarriage or estrangement, which would lead him to the answer to Sutherland’s question.

‘There’s the hotel,’ the Consul said suddenly, and then, ‘It’s nothing to do with me, of course. He can put down whoever he wants.’ Resentment had become a habit of speech with Sutherland, a philosophy. He spoke as if everything he said were the contradiction of a popular view.

‘She’s old,’ Avery replied at last. ‘It’s a question of protecting her from shock. I expect that’s what he had in mind when he filled in his passport application. She’s been ill; a bad heart. She’s had an operation.’ It sounded very childish.

‘Ah.’

They had reached the outskirts of the town.

‘There has to be a post-mortem,’ Sutherland said. ‘It’s the law here, I’m afraid, in the case of violent death.’

Leclerc was going to be angry about that. Sutherland continued, ‘For us, it makes the formalities more complicated. The Criminal Police take over the body until the post-mortem is complete. I asked them to be quick, but one can’t insist.’

‘Thanks. I thought I’d have the body flown back.’ As they turned off the main road into the market square, Avery asked casually, as if he had no personal interest in the outcome, ‘What about his effects? I’d better take them with me, hadn’t I?’

‘I doubt whether the police will hand them over until they’ve had the go-ahead from the public prosecutor. The post-mortem report goes to him; he gives clearance. Did your brother leave a will?’

‘I’ve no idea.’

‘You’d not happen to know whether you’re an executor?’

‘No.’

Sutherland gave a dry, patient laugh. ‘I can’t help feeling you’re a little premature. Next of kin is not quite the same as executor,’ he said. ‘It gives you no legal rights, I’m afraid, apart from the disposal of the body.’ He paused, looking back over his seat while he reversed the car into a parking space. ‘Even if the police hand your brother’s effects over to me, I’m not allowed to release them until I’ve had instructions from the Office, and
they,
’ he continued quickly, for Avery was about to interrupt him, ‘won’t issue such instructions to
me
until a grant of probate has been made or a Letter of Administration issued. But I can give you a death certificate,’ he added consolingly, opening his door, ‘if the insurance companies require it.’ He looked at Avery sideways, as if wondering whether he stood to inherit anything. ‘It’ll cost you five shillings for the Consular registration and five shillings per certified copy. What was that you said?’

‘Nothing.’ Together they climbed the steps to the police station.

‘We’ll be seeing Inspector Peersen,’ Sutherland explained. ‘He’s quite well disposed. You’ll kindly let me handle him.’